Here's the irony at the heart of our artificial intelligence (AI) moment: The tool designed to think for us may be the very thing that forces us to think better. Yes, AI can make us lazy, atrophying certain skills as we outsource judgment to machines. Recent research (e.g., Kosmyna et al., 2025) suggests heavy AI use may weaken certain cognitive capacities.

But this framing misses something essential about how human minds develop. Every major technology has reduced our capacities in some areas while expanding them in others.1 Writing obviated our need for memorization—some theories suggest oral cultures possessed near-photographic recall—but it allowed us to externalize cognition, to think by writing, and to make thinking collectively available, moreso with the printing press, and now digital media.

What might we gain in adapting to AI?

The monumental psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1962) observed that we aren't born with a fully developed thinking apparatus. We have the potential only. We encounter thoughts—raw, undigested experiences that exceed our current capacity—and the problem created by such thoughts spurs us to develop thinking.

Thomas Ogden, noted Bion scholar, puts it this way:

A young child encounters an overwhelming experience—the death of a beloved pet. They don't know what to do with this flood of feeling. A competent parent provides a "container," helping the child regulate and make age-appropriate sense of the loss. If this happens successfully enough, we develop what Bion called an "apparatus for thinking"; if it fails, we develop an "apparatus for projection." This capacity matures into proper conceptualization—what Bion called "realizations," when concept meets reality and things make sense, allowing us to move forward even when we don't like what we've realized. If we can't manage the experience, we aren't thinking—we are projecting, and splitting.

Bion understood that we can't metabolize overwhelming experience alone. We need containment—another mind that can hold what........

© Psychology Today